Saturday, March 12, 2016

color and music

This week I heard Mahler’s Symphony of a thousand at the Kimmel Center with Yanick Nezet Sequin conducting.

It was a wonderful performance balletically conducted by Sequin. But even before it began the whole scene was beautiful to look at with the combination of red wood tones, the black and white of all the performer's formal wear and the huge glorious organ at the back of the stage.

As the oboist hit the perfect A440 the concert master tuned his strings accordingly and all the players tuned their instruments, I once again wished that there was a tuned instrument that allowed me to play colors in time and that others would have tuned instruments with various textures to play along with me. How glorious it would be.

We take for granted that musical instruments are tuned to a finite set of tones and because of this music can be written down and performed by anyone. This makes possible great symphonies with multiple instruments producing magnificent sound.

It could be the same with color if only someone would design an instrument to play a tuned set of colors in real time to get the ball rolling.

Pass this along to a techy friend or two. Times awastin!

Here are a couple of examples of what it might look like for one instrument to play colors.

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In this blog I try to bring as many small paintings as I can manage to create - I'm shooting for 5 a week - to the great expansive world of the internet. You can see all the work I have created for this blog so far if you go to my web site. http://www.nancyherman.com

About Me

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1939. Grew up in Glenside, Pa, Philadelphia and Worcester, Pa. Attended Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania. Graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.